The Dream
by Sarah Black
Summary: What happens when your mind decides to up and leave? What does your mind really look like? Do you want to know? Severus didn't really have a choice. Really scary dreams ahead.


**The Dream**

_by Sarah Black_

_Creditness must go to Meph for she has great spelling and grammarness._

  


He woke up feeling even worse than he had when he had turned in for the night. It was that dream, that horrible, weird and all around _unnatural_ nightmare. The dreams started out as his normal dreams did. With familiar scenes where he was stirring a cauldron, adding ingredients that varied from his students' faces and the faces of his colleagues.It was gruesome, but normal. But as he was there, dreaming his own business everything would become colder and darker. His Patronus would slither by, rendered useless. The force he was battling was not the presence of a Dementor. It was some horrible shadow he did not comprehend.

Up until now that is. Now he knew exactly what he had been battling quietly in his sleep. At last it had revealed itself to him.

It was a mere child, a small dark doll-like little girl with big brown doe eyes and a cruel mouth. He had nearly laughed, but she had silenced him. Somehow she had shut down his vocal cords. He had been helpless, a useless inmate in the fortress of his mind. Briefly he had wished that his mind let down its fierce guard but then he had recalled that he would be quite dead without his walls.

As he became more desperate for an escape the girl would become crueler looking. She was doing this. She was imprisoning him. Shutting him down. Taking over...

A horrid little smile lit up her features as a candle without wax would light a room with no walls. A garishly thin little arm appeared, previously obscured by the folds of her robes. They were ripped and torn and looked like they belonged to a corpse that had drowned. Right after he made that observation he noticed how they seemed to move around on their own... moving as if they were still underwater.

Her fingers beckoned to him, slowly and dramatically, as if she were miming the movement on stage. Her fingers were long and strangely smooth with drastically long fingernails that were rotting at the tips.

For a moment he had stood there, mesmerized, but then he had regained sense and he had done the only sane thing there was left to do. He ran for it. 

He had awoken with her cry of furious anger echoing in his ears. So tired. That bothered him. Hadn't he slept at all? 

If there were even one shred of evidence supporting that girl's existence he would burn it. But how could he burn his weariness? He _had_ woken. You cannot wake unless you have slept. Or is that the truth indeed?

He was confused and tired. Confusion was something he preferred to avoid at all costs, in himself and especially in others. Weariness wasn't allowed until after tea.

Then there was the dread. He dreaded the evening and loathed the sight of his bed. For evenings and beds only brought about the terror of sleep and sleep was something that brought about horrible little girls with cruel smiles and rotting fingernails... something he would have very much liked to keep out of his life entirely. It was miserable enough already.

But time has a way of passing at it's own pace and it's never the speed you would have liked. But passing is what time does best. He found himself standing at the foot of his bed that very evening. As he prepared to face his fears he thought up all sorts of things, which would save him from having to sleep that night.

He could go prowl the corridors. Catching students that were out of bounds was always good sport and so good for the soul. He could cast several Cheering Charms on himself to the effect of making himself so incoherent with delight that sleeping would seem a waste of a perfectly good mood. He could poison himself and rid himself of everything along with the dreams.

With that in mind he went to bed. He was a grown man and he would not be cast out of his own room by some silly dream.

He told the empty frame on his wall good night and whispered an automatic 'nox'. All was dark.

He was in the Shrieking Shack faced with a horrible drooling monster. He shot a curse at it but Potter jumped in the way. 

"Don't you dare hurt my godfather!" Potter bravely supplied to the civilized conversation he was now having with Lord Voldemort. The Dark Lord was (just like usual) wearing a tea cosy and offering him poison in a mug. He was about to tell his master that he never drank from mugs when everything went dark. The cold settled in his bones like it had always lived there.

She was right there in front of him where the Dark Lord had been. They stared at each other for a good long while before she started singing.

She had a horrible sort of voice that made your heart squirm... but it was the words and the memories that accompanied them that were really frightening.

  


Look at your loved ones

Look really close

Look at the ones that should love you the most

Look at them hate you

Look at them scream

Look at them cut out your heart

  


He found that they were standing in his old nursery as she recited the verse. He saw his parents and he saw himself as an infant. He was lying in his crib, and he was screaming murder. His parents were screaming at each other. They were arguing about him, about who should go shut him up this time... The image faded.

He looked up and received no small shock when the little girl was not little any longer. She was a teenager. He was too he realized then. All around him were memories from his adolescence. 

  


Look at the lone one

Taunted and teased

Look at the victim

Look at him scream

Look at his fury

Look at his pain

Look as his sanity fail

  


He saw with perfect clarity that night in the Shrieking Shack, where Black had nearly lost him his life, where Lupin had nearly done the dirty work and where Potter had destroyed his remaining sanity by saving his life. 

He could feel the exact horror he had felt then. The final stab that had rid him of the last drop of blood. 

He remembered how he had forgotten everything. Speech and how to walk... everything had simply blown up like a failed potions experiment. He remembered shaking all over when it all came back to him. He remembered screaming.

He did not remember tears.

Fury. He remembered terrible fury that his mind would not have been able to hold if it had still been whole. It was so huge that it leaked from his mind and into his body and out into the very air around him. It wasn't even a feeling. It was something else. It was a living being that had surrounded him. The horrible anger had nearly suffocated his senses. It was beyond throwing heavy objects. It was beyond murder and even revenge did not seem tempting. 

All the fury wanted was to bury him alive.

He awoke with his face in his pillow. He turned himself around with enormous difficulty and concentrated on breathing for a long moment. He was soaked in cold sweat and his heart was still beating a lot faster than it ought to be doing.

This would not do. Every time he woke up he was exhausted. He couldn't go on in such a manner... he had to find rest. He would have to resort to his least favourite solution. A potion. Dreamless sleep was something he was in desperate need of and if he had to resort to a potion to get it so it would have to be.

Bitterly he coaxed himself into getting out of bed. Classes to teach, potions to make.

How had it come to be, that he who prided himself in his mind's ability to lock others out, his ability to control his thoughts, how had it happened that he surrendered to a potion that would seize control of him, his subconscious mind, oppressing it, blocking it, _controlling _it.

He tried to think of something else as his hands went through the motions, cutting this, chopping that, stirring again...

He wouldn't have to see her again; the ghastly being that seemed to haunt him. He wouldn't have to listen to that macabre nursery rhyme, wouldn't have to relive those memories.

He felt the sort of mad glee that will make a man cackle.

After consuming the potion he had brewed for his convenience he fell into blissfully stupid sleep.

Or he would have, if it hadn't been for that pesky nightmare.

She was fully grown now. She looked like the queen of some arctic wasteland in all her slightly drowned glory. Her skin was a little greenish around the edges and her fingernails were black with rot and slime. Her hair had joined her robes in floating about her person mysteriously as if she were underwater. There were long tangles of black hair. It looked wet, but that was mostly because of the way it floated about and of course the seaweed could have had something to do with it as well.

"You cannot escape. All means of getting me out are ultimately futile. I have things yet to show..." 

Her voice made him slightly queasy. He wished she wouldn't talk.

The memories started to flood his mind filling him with foreboding, if these were the memories, what words would accompany? Could they possibly be worse?

  


Look where fury leads the blind

Look on what evil stands

Look upon the tortured ones scream as they writhe and die

Look in the eyes of the torturer as he tortures without why

Look at the pain of a lost soul

Look at the loss of the lie

Look, as it is too late, too late for it to try

Far too late

Far too late 

Fury leads to far too late

When is it time to cry?

  


He really was underwater now. Drowning along with her. A storm of his unshed tears poured down from the heavens and formed a lake and he was anchored at the bottom, the weight of his guilt holding him down there in the dark.

He did not even attempt to get away. He knew it would be a pointless venture. He was content to watch as the ghosts of his past swirled around him, blurring together so he could not distinguish which was which. It was beautiful in a twisted sort of way.

Hours later, after Professor Severus Snape had failed to show up for any of his morning classes, he was discovered in his bed. He was quite mad and believed himself to have drowned. He would not speak a word to anyone but could be heard reciting an unheard of poem in the deep of the night.

The official explanation was that he had simply gone mad from the stress of his line of work.

No one believed that.

  


A certain Headmaster was wont to blame it on a certain Dark Lord.

  


A certain Dark Lord was wont to not caring in the slightest.

  


But the truth of the matter is stranger than anyone might suspect.

  


A mind can be a powerful thing. Lose your heart, your soul, your sanity and allow the fury to take over and your mind will have no ties to you. It will trick you and leave you. Nothing will be left behind, except maybe a shell with even less use than a Dementor's leftover. 

Beware of your mind. Know it... don't let it become the monster your fear it is.

  


  


_Reviewness is always nice._


End file.
